Vogue magazine is full of shit, reports today's Huffington Post. (On a similar note, so is Harper's Bazaar!) HuffPo writer Trevor Butterworth seems specifically shocked (and awed?) by one particular piece in the magazine's August issue: "Infertile Ground", which all but tells readers to clad themselves in hazmat suits since, as the sensationalists insist, plastics and products with phthalate will cause infertility or make baby boys emerge from the womb without semen. But wait! As Butterworth says:

Um, boys don't produce semen until they reach puberty - and even the most precocious male is not going to reach puberty before leaving the womb. Nor have any actual baby boys suffered malformed reproductive tracts as a result of phthalate exposure.

Vogue writer Robert Sullivan reports that 'Most recently, [Shanna Swan] and a team of scientists published a paper hat showed the prenatal exposure to phthalates - one type of endocrine disruptor found in plastic bottles and toys, among other things - adversely affects genital development in boys.' But if you read the study, Swan did not find any adverse genital development - all the baby boys in her study were normal. What she found were a number of correlations between phthalate metabolites in the urine of pregnant women and a biomarker in their children which she believes supports the *hypothesis* that phthalate exposure adversely affects genital development in males. But as Swan admitted, the "reliability" of the biomarker in humans 'has not been established.'

So Vogue
... not so up on the latest news! But neither is Trevor Butterworth! After all, if he'd ever read the magazine, he'd know that its editors regularly claim that unless their readers regularly drop $700 on a shoe that will have fallen from favor the following month, they are destined to lives of loneliness and suffering.